From 1995 to 2013 I travelled North America extensively as part of my working routine. So much so that more than once I thought about getting tour T-shirts made up, listing all the cities that I had visited in that calendar year. Since my esteemed employer didn’t see the value in such a project I didn’t ever actually get that done. These days I’m a homebody.

Recently I discovered a web site that makes it easy to create a map denoting the states that you’ve visited, thus highlighting those that you yet to see. Here are my results.

I’ve long been a big fan of The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan’s 1967 spy series. One of the strange an interesting feature of the program was a robotic security device known simply as “Rover.” Rover was basically a weather balloon that rolled along the ground or water. Rover was dispatched to fetch people trying to escape from The Village. It seems to me that Sphero has the potential to be a 3” Rover.

I wonder if this could be used to add a new layer of spooky/creepy to our Halloween presentation? It would be really cool to see a herd of them behaving like the Velociraptors in Jurassic Park.

Earlier today there was an announcement that the TEDxHouston 2012 video recordings were finally edited and being put online via You Tube. You can find the entire playlist here.

You may recall that I was a volunteer working at that event. Working with the TEDxHouston team was a great experience. It was, for me, a return to my roots as I operated a camera for the first time in many years. It was great to just be in attendance, but also nice to feel that I was doing something useful to foster the production.

This video featuring Jay Berckley on education was an particular favorite. His was the very last talk of the day. By then I was running the camera on the back of the stage, getting the rear view of the presenter and the audience reaction. I think that point I was getting to be reasonably comfortable in the role of camera operator.

It’s a curious things to have spent more than two decades in the business of video production and broadcast technology. Invariably we get to be specialists of a sort, even though we all start out with the basics of tele-production. My comfort zone has always been editing and graphics.

The tricky thing is that, as a professional, we come to know enough to question our own abilities at these basic tasks that we once did without thought. After all, there were few other people there who are in fact professional, freelance camera-people.

Like riding a bike, it eventually comes back. I’m grateful for everyone on the crew who were both gracious and patient.

I look forward to helping with TEDxHouston 2013. That is, if they’ll have me again. I even have some nice ideas for how to leverage one or two of my personal passions to augment the production. How about TEDxHouston presented in full surround sound? That might be fun.